A Man's Place: Annie Ernaux

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There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships.

Ernaux's bare-boned, fragmented prose style is often harsh on her subject matter. She observes her parents' hard work and dedication to support their family with sympathetic snobbishness. (...) There is a felt distance here, in how Ernaux's father treats her as a girl, and how she writes of him from the vantage point of her own adulthood. But that doesn't make the book cold." - Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman Hay que admirar la habilidad de Ernaux para escribir de una manera tan alejada y sin emoción, como un reportero transmitiendo las noticias. Sin embargo, yo por mi parte necesito emoción en mis lecturas, ya sea amor u odio, pero algo al menos, de otra forma tal vez me sienta más inclinado en leer en su lugar un panfleto de tendencia en mueblería.

Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. His greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d’être of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him. Their daughter goes on to study and becomes a teacher -- the opening passage is about her passing her teaching certificate exam -- and moves into an intellectual world completely alien to that of her parents. urn:oclc:840256688 Republisher_date 20121220080730 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected] Scandate 20120924013249 Scanner scribe29.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) No-one writes about family relationships with the nuance, both emotional and analytical, that Ernaux does, and such a reflective, self-critical perspective is even more precious. Her exploration of language in their household is sharp…It might initially be read as a cold portrait, but the emotions and passionate thought rage through the taut writing. Likened to Simone de Beauvoir for her astute chronicling of a generation, Ernaux’s prose is intimate and unforgettable.’

Ma qui, nelle pagine di Annie Ermeaux, siamo ben oltre la vergogna: la figlia sente di far parte di un altro mondo e un’altra epoca, che non ha più nulla da spartire con il medioevo del padre.It is difficult to write about our loved ones after their death during the time of grief as we will have to relive our memories which will make us happy and sad at the same time. The core of this short book (and most of her books are short, part of a larger memoir project) is of course about her father, begun at the occasion of his death. It is also about a time and a place, mid twentieth century France. Ernaux writes of her struggle to move out of the working-class life in which she was raised to the middle class--university, teaching primary school, marrying “well” into her husband’s middl

When I read Proust or Mauriac, I don't think they evoke the time when my father was a child. Its setting is the Middle Ages.” Ernaux’s parents met at the rope factory. Then her father worked as a roofer. When he fell from a rafter, her parents looked for a business they could manage, one that didn’t require a lot of start-up money. They bought a grocery store. Because they had to grant credit, they struggled financially. Her father had to get a second job while her mother ran the business. An unsentimental portrait of a man loved as a parent, admired as an individual but, because of habits and education, heartbreakingly apart. Moving and memorable.’ Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.This book though short, tells us a lot about the family life of hardworking people in France. Annie calls her writing style a neutral way of writing. She shares all the thoughts that went through her mind while writing this book I liked it, thought it felt quite familiar to me, almost as if I had written it myself about my own father, who was born in 1913 and died at the age of 76, close to twenty years ago, on the operating table, in heart by-pass surgery. That was the single worst moment of my life, having the surgeon report to us the news. I thought my own heart would literally burst from grief as I heard from the surgeon this news. I was close to him, in a non-verbal way. I was the fifth of six children, loved him very much, though I was quietly somewhat ashamed he was so much older than my friends' fathers, and uneducated as I myself went to school. Memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste,” writes Annie Ernaux in A Man’s Place, an elegy for her father. Born into a working-class family in Normandy, Ernaux’s memories – bad taste notwithstanding – have secured her a high place in French literature, where she is the recipient of numerous awards.

Terminei de pôr em dia a herança que tive de depositar na soleira do mundo burguês e culto quando nele entrei.» Ernaux expands on personal experience to reflect universal themes of generational and class alienation, of grief at a parent's loss, and of the evanescence of memory, in what she has called an ``autobiographical narrative.'' As she describes her father's life, she comes to accept his recent death and his ``legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world.'' Her father, son of Normandy farmhands, managed to struggle up from cowherd—the lowest rung in society—to become a tenuous member of the working class. With his wife he ran a small cafe and grocery store, an increasingly marginal business as supermarkets moved in but viable enough to send his only daughter to a private school. It was a life permeated from the beginning with fear of poverty and shaped by stark prescriptions: ``The only way to escape one's parents' poverty was not to impregnate a woman''; ``You don't have ideas when you are in trade''; ``never lay oneself open to criticism—for what are people going to say?'' Her father is a man who's remembered for childhood outings to the circus and beach, but also a figure, a country man at heart, from whom she grew irrevocably away. ``Books and music are all right for you. I don't need them to live,'' he told her—yet at the end his ``greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d`etre of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.'' An unsentimental portrait of a man loved as a parent, admired as an individual but, because of habits and education, heartbreakingly apart. Her father is focussed on appearing in good standing to the community, making a success of his small grocery shop. One can already soon imagine how this leads to a divide between him and his daughter. I felt the portrayal, while being factual, to be emotional. As a reader you feel the distance between generations, how people are shaped by their upbringing and can't transcend these bounds even with those theoretically closest to them. At times I recognise the same with my father, who almost always ask me if I still have a job, himself having grown up in the eighties with hundreds of rejection letters, while I completely feel different about the subject.

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The sense of shame, of the intransigent hierarchy of society, abounds in her brilliant scrutiny of her father’s life, A Man’s Place , first published in 1983. Ernaux’s father died two months after she passed her teaching exams. (She would go on to teach in schools and university, from 1977-2000, alongside writing books.) A Man’s Place is very much part of what Ernaux calls the “lived dimension of history” – it is dispassionate about the life of a working-class man of his time, a struggling grocer with minimal education: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she warns us. Similarly, her brief, electric, I Remain in Darkness, about her mother’s dementia and subsequent death, with Ernaux by now divorced and middle-aged, is – while neutrally and starkly written – saturated throughout with a daughter’s grief. The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.”